Teen who killed man over cell phone gets 50 years prison

Deaundre Davis, the 18-year-old man a jury in January convicted of killing a man after an argument over a cell phone, was sentenced Friday to 50 years in prison.

Circuit Judge Charles Burton’s sentence for Davis comes a year after the July 2015 murder of 27-year-old Anthony Marcel Jones Jr., whose body was found outside an abandoned house in the Kennedy Estates area just outside the town of Jupiter.

Witnesses at Davis’ trial testified that Davis, then 17, shot Jones because he wanted the $80 another man agreed to pay for the return of his iPhone.

Assistant State Attorney Reid Scott successfully urged jurors to convict Davis despite the fact that a big part of the case rested on the eyewitness testimony of a longtime drug addict who admitted he was high when he saw the shooting happen.

Jurors convicted Davis of one count each of first degree murder, armed robbery and armed aggravated assault. Assistant Public Defender Scott Pribble had asked Burton to forgo the mandatory minimum sentences of 25 and 20 years respectively on the robbery and assault charges, but Burton on Thursday denied the request.

He sentenced Davis to 50 years on the murder charge, 40 for the robbery and 20 for the assault, ordering all counts to run together.

Because Davis was 17 when the shooting occurred, the only way he would have received a life sentence was if Burton made a special finding that he deserved the maximum punishment.

Jones’ family last year said the 27-year-old, who’d had 10 arrest and had just finished a 110-day jail stint before his murder, struggled to overcome drug addiction but desperately wanted to get out of a life on the streets.

“He was a good kid. He had his problems just like everyone else, but that doesn’t make him a bad person,” his father, Anthony Jones, Sr., said. “He didn’t deserve what he got. Nobody deserves what he got.”